Q&A with the authors of Batch

Joel
MacCharles and Dana Harrison are the duo behind the popular website
WellPreserved.ca. Dana's
love of great food is only matched by her love for tasty design.
She is the Creative Director at WellPreserved, where she makes sure
everything looks as good as it tastes. Joel is a home cook and
writer. He loves to cook a great meal, but beyond that he is
passionate about learning, understanding the impact of our food
choices, getting to know where food comes from and the people who
help bring it to the table. This passion has
resulted in over 1700 articles and recipes shared through several
online communities. Joel and Dana have recently released Batch: Over 200 Recipes, Tips and Techniques for a
Well Preserved Kitchen, their first
cookbook. (Enter our contest for your chance to win a copy
of the book - US & Canada only.) We caught up to the busy pair
to ask them a few questions about Batch:

You have a very popular website (WellPreserved.ca). How
different was the process of writing the cookbook from writing for
the website?

Thank you for the kind words! There were a lot of differences
between the two - writing on our site is something I've always
thought of as a journal or a diary. It's casual, informal and more
stream-of-consciousness than writing a book!

When Dana and I started WellPreserved I published new content
for 1,500 consecutive days. WellPreserved was created on-demand! We
often wouldn't know the topic of the day until the alarm clock went
off at 5:00AM and I started writing or until after a farmers market
and we came home with a flat of strawberries or other fruit.

Unlike our site, the book required almost as much planning as it
did writing. Dana and I had to spend a lot of time up-front trying
to figure out what the book as going to be like before we could
start writing or designing. Dana recently looked at our book pitch
(from 3 years ago) and it was a good reminder of all of that
planning - the book is almost identical to the planning we did
before we wrote a single recipe.

I see that you recently ran a series of live classes on
your website, teaching the fundamentals of preserving - making
pickled onions, preserved lemons, sauerkraut, etc. How did they go
and are you planning more?

Those were so fun! We did 10 days of live broadcasting from our
home kitchen. The feedback was awesome; we had a lot of interaction
and around 12,000 views in those 10 days. It was also ridiculously
fun to see photos in the following days of people making their own
hot sauces, krauts and infusions.

We will absolutely be doing more this summer once our calendars
free up a little more. There is something so invigorating about
being able to use technology to interact with people in real-time
and share our passion for preserving and show just how easy it can
be!

How many preserving jars do you get through in a year
and do you have a preference for which jars you use?

Great question! Many people are surprised to hear that we never
fully empty our pantry. We see preserving as a year-round activity
and often preserve ingredients to store for up to 2 years. Because
some jars are filled once every two years and others are filled 3
or 4 times in a year it's tough to keep count! We figure we live
with about 800 jars of preserves.

And which lucky people get all the preserves that you
make?

My Mother says we never share but I argue that our pantry is an
open shelf to her and she isn't grabbing enough!

We enjoy sharing preserves with friends and family and love to
host preserve swaps with our community as well (imagine going to a
local bar and meeting 30 or 40 people who preserve and swapping
jam, pickles, bacon, sourdough starters, kombucha and more!)

Preserves are more than condiments to us - we see them as
ingredients of a pantry with nearly endless combinations. It's a
lot of fun to be able to bring a few of them as a host/hostess gift
or to add to a friends meal that allow them to experience something
unique as well.

Many people just think about preserving as making jams,
jellies and pickles in Mason jars. What other types of preserving
do you cover on your website and in the book?

Thank you for asking this! We're on a mission to remind people
that there is so much more to preserving than jam and pickles
(though we make both and love them too). So many people start
preserving with strawberry jam without knowing it's one of the more
difficult preserving methods and is often associated with hot, hard
work (it's really not that bad!). If you're willing to wait 10 days
you can make bacon in minutes and learning to make mead (honey
wine) or homemade soda isn't that much more work. Many are further
surprised that most preserving doesn't require specialized
equipment or ingredients as well.

With having so many preserving projects, how much have
you found that your food shopping has changed?

We became seasonal eaters almost by accident. I'm writing this
in June and imported hot peppers are around $4 per pound in Toronto
right now. We're still eating preserved peppers (dehydrated,
roasted and pickled and frozen as a puree) from last fall when we
bought 30 pounds of them for $20.

We didn't set out to build a pantry like this; it just sort of
happened. In the process we found that it was relatively easy to
buy products in bulk and preserve them as long as we were willing
to find new ways to cook some of our favorite meals. For example,
our pasta sauce is likely to be cooked with roasted pepper puree
that we froze instead of chunks of peppers. Because most of our
preserves are made with ingredients from their peak season our
meals tend to taste better than what we could buy 'fresh'
today.

Are there any recipes you have created to use up
preserves that you've been thrilled by? And have you included any
recipes using preserves in the new book?

The book has 150 preserving recipes (using the 7 techniques) and
50 recipes which feature preserves as 'center of the plate'
meals.

When we started preserving I made almost 300 jars of jam and
don't eat toast and didn't know what to do with them -it turns out
that many people who want to preserve have had similar experiences
so including casual meal recipes was important to us. For example,
instead of using Blueberry Maple Jam as a toast topper we use it as
a core ingredient for a sauce for salmon in the book. Using
preserves as ingredients is a lot of fun and creates combinations
of flavours we wouldn't have tried otherwise.

When writing the book we wanted to make sure that we were
equally proud of each recipe. I really feel like I can stand behind
each one and find that my 'favorites' change often. I really dig
the fact that many of the recipes are directly inspired by people
in our lives and that we were able to share tiny pieces of our
lives and community through the stories of the recipes in the
book.

Dana and I are always excited by the tomato chapter - tomatoes
mean family to us and bring back so many memories of time with my
parents when we made tomato sauce for a weekend (we still put up
around 160 jars of tomato sauce with them every year) so those
recipes have special meaning for me. I am also a giant fan of spicy
food so the hot pepper chapter is one I go to often.

Many people are put off home preserving by fear of food
safety. How do you help people get over these fears?

I remember being scared of almost everything I didn't know.
Seriously! I can remember being petrified of skiing, riding a
bicycle, driving a car and public speaking. Your experience will be
different than mine of course but I really encourage people to
think about the things you once feared and how a little knowledge
brought a lot of comfort.

Botulism (the most feared health consequence of canning) is a
serious fear for many and it's important that you learn a few
basics to protect yourself (we share these in Batch and on
our website but any reputable canning site or book will guide you
through that) but you'll find there is little to fear.

The latest statistics I have show a total of 139 cases on
Botulism occurred in the USA from 1990-2014. That's 5.8 (avoidable)
cases a year on average and not all are fatal. Compare that to the
450 people per year who die falling out of bed or the 13 people who
die from vending machines. I'm not making light of these deaths but
the contrast is striking.

All food carries some risk. Our commercial food system has shown
that - the number of people getting sick from commercial produce
shows that there is risk in any food we eat. By learning how to
preserve you can control the process yourself and will find it's
not nearly as scary as it sounds - after all it's knowledge (and
not the lack of it) that will help us get over any fear!